•7 



DEMOCRATIC PEACE 



OFFEEED FOR THE AOOEPTANOE 



OF 



PENNSYLVANIA YOTERS- 



PHILADELPHIA: 

1864. 






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: U - 



A DEMOCEATIC PEACE. 



As Pennsylvania goes, so goes the Union. No candidate for 
the Presidency has ever succeeded in the. popular vote without 
receiving that of the Keystone State. Her soil has thus came 
to be regarded as the decisive battle-ground in a Presidential 
campaign, and no efforts are spared to secure her all-powerful 
influence. This casts an additional responsibility upon her 
voters, and every citizen should feel, as he approaches the polls, 
that perhaps his ballot may decide the destiny of the Nation. 

For this is no common election which is now upon us. It is 
no mere struggle between opposing hordes of office-seekers. It 
is the inevitable strife between Light and Darkness, between 
Liberty and Despotism, between Order and Anarchy. Let the 
right triumph, and a regenerated Nation will again spring for- 
ward on the mission of civilization, which will render it the con- 
trolling power of the earth. Let the enemies of Union succeed, 
and our future lies darkly threatening before us — a mass of war- 
ring republics, reduced, to anarchy, till half a century of name- 
less suffering shall make our children fly to the arms of military 
despotism, as a refuge from worse evils. 

This is no fancy picture, but the sober, stern reality. Ex- 
amine for yourselves the principles and policy avowed by the 
two parties which now solicit your suffrages ; give to them the 
close, earnest attention which the momentous choice demands of 
freemen, and you cannot but realize the truth. 

On the one hand the National Union Party asks you to bear 
for yet a brief space the sacrifices of war ; to give an earnest 



support to those wlio are carrying on the struggle ; to resolve 
that nothing shall dissever the Union of our fathers. Nerve 
your manhood to do this, and from the St. John's to the Rio 
Grande, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we shall have one na- 
tion, one people, whose happy industry will in a few short years 
erase all traces of our destructive strife, and when we shall have 
passed away, our children will rise and call us blessed. 

On the other hand the so-called Democracy appeals to your 
basest fears, and asks you to purchase a year or two of delu- 
sive peace with an indefinite period of strife, to which our recent 
struggles offer no comparison. Demagogues seek to appal you 
with prophecies of bankruptcy and defeat. They tell you that 
the rebellion cannot be subdued, and must be treated with. That 
war has failed, and that diplomacy must settle terms of peace. 
The rebels have declared that no terms will be listened to that 
do not concede as an indispensable preliminary the independence 
of the South. A Democratic peace, therefore, means separation, 
and separation means eternal war. 

Examine the Chicago platform. It is short and simple, and 
in what it says and what it omits to say, it reduces the issues 
between the two great parties practically to the one point — 
honorable peace through successful war, or disastrous peace 
through negotiation. There is in it no word respecting slavery 
or abolition. That question is thrown out of sight, for it is 
superseded by the expectation of a divided nation, with freedom 
on one side of the line, and slavery on the other. There is no 
word respecting the Monroe doctrine and Mexico, for a Northern 
republic has no interests on the Gulf, and when two nearly equal 
Nationalities shall be established, it were folly for one of them to 
dictate what shall be the destinies of a continent no longer under 
our control. 

So much for what it does not say. "What it does say is re- 
ducible to two points — condemnation of the Administration for 
the exercise of unconstitutional power, and the cessation of hos- 
tilities to negotiate for peace. 

The former of these, to which so large a portion of the rcso- 



lutions is devoted, scarcely needs an allusion. The unexampled 
violence of language habitually used by Democratic orators and 
journals, when abusing the Administration, is sufficient refutation 
of the assertion that liberty, and even license of speech and of 
the press, has been endangered. That no real difference exists 
between the two great parties on this point is abundantly evi- 
dent in the choice of the Chicago candidate. It was General 
McClellan himself who initiated the policy of military arrests 
when he seized the Maryland Legislature in full session in Sep- 
tember,,1861, an act perfectly justifiable, but which hSs since 
had no parallel. So likewise in the Maryland election of No- 
vember, 186J, he set the example of military surveillance over . 
elections, by "protecting" Union voters with a file of soldiers 
at each poll. Mr. Harris, a delegate from that State, brought 
these matters before the Convention, and in opposing the nomi- 
nation of General McClellan, declared that "all the charges you 
can make against Abraham Lincoln and against Benjamin 
Butler, I can make and sustain against this man, George B. 
McClellan." — " Those things that we have charged so frequently 
against Abraham Lincoln, he, George B. McClellan, has been 
guilty of himself." When, in the face of these facts, the Con- 
vention nominated General McClellan unanimously, the party 
accepted and endorsed his acts, and committed itself to the 
policy and doctrine of " military necessity." Between the parties 
there is no difference on that score. 

The question of war or peace is, therefore, the only one at 
issue. The National Union men boldly declare that the war 
must be prosecuted until military resistance is overcome by the 
sword, until the supremacy of the National Government and of 
the Constitution shall be acknowledged everywhere within the 
territories of the United States. They pledge the whole re- 
sources of the Nation to accomplish this, and will be satisfied 
with nothing less. They hold that in no other way can a Union 
worth having be restored ; that no compromises shall tempt 
future rebellions by rewarding rebels ; and that no sacrifices are 
too great to secure the future stability of the institutions which 



so long conferred upon us unexampled prosperity and hap- 
piness. 

The Democrats on the other hand proclaim that " the ex- 
periment of war" has been a failure, and that our highest 
interests demand an "immediate" " cessation of hostilities, with 
a view to the ultimate convention of all the States, or other 
peaceable means to that end, that at the earliest practicable 
moment peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal 
Union of the States." 

No thoughtful man can fail to see that this means simply 
Disunion, in spite of the saving clause at the end. To openly 
advocate Disunion itself, would cost too many votes, for the 
people have not sunk so low as to knowingly abandon the price- 
less heritage bequeathed to them by their fathers. It was safer 
and more politic to profess a moderate zeal for "the basis of the 
Federal Union," whatever that may be, and to advocate a course 
which would indirectly but not less surely, lead to that result. 

To grant an armistice, or "cessation of hostilities," is to 
abandon at once and forever all hope of subduing the rebellion. 
It means to raise the blockade, and allow the free export of 
cotton and naval stores to Europe, and the importation of un- 
limited munitions of war in exchange. It means the withdrawal 
of our forces from New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, Little Rock, 
Charleston Harbor, Port Royal, Newberne, Petersburg, Chat- 
tanooga, Nashville, Knoxville and Memphis. Perhaps even 
St. Louis, Louisville, Wheeling and Baltimore would have to be 
abandoned ; for Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Mis- 
souri arc claimed by the Confederacy, with fully as much show 
of legal right as Tennessee, Arkansas, or Louisiana. An 
armistice thus means the giving up of all that we have gained 
during three years of mighty war, and permitting the rebels to 
restore and consolidate their power. It gives them all that they 
could have asked had they been successful on every field of battle. 
It means recognition abroad and independence at home. 

At the expiration of such an armistice, a resumption of hos- 
tilities for the suppression of the rebellion would be impossible. 



Thrown back to the starting point, dispirited, our credit de- 
stroyed, our patriotic ardor checked, we should be in no condition 
to undertake again the gigantic task which we had abandoned 
when nearly accomplished. Our expenditures would have con- 
tinued during the interval with but little abatement, for we 
should have felt it necessary to keep our navy and land forces 
on their present footing, to resist the aggression which would 
otherwise follow any refusal of the demands of our triumphant 
enemy, and our capacity to raise funds by loan would be virtually 
annulled, for a Government which cannot maintain its authority 
cannot maintain its credit. Humiliated and discredited, quar- 
relling among ourselves, with discordant interests no longer re- 
pressed by any central authority worthy of respect, we should 
enter a conference or convention in the worst possible position 
for negotiation. 

The Confederacy on the other hand, would hold all the winning 
cards. Keleased from the iron gripe which is now threatening 
its destruction, the relentless despotism which controls it would 
turn to the best account the magnificent opportunities afforded 
by our cowardice and folly. Credit abroad, based upon cotton, 
would give it all the resources it would want. Deserters from 
conscription would be remorselessly hunted down and forced 
into the ranks. The vast territories abandoned by our troops 
would yield large levies of men and open a wide area for the 
impressment of supplies. Salt, coal and iron would be indus- 
triously mined, and stores, munitions and implements of war 
would be rapidly accumulated. Ere the necessary preliminaries 
of a convention could be gone through with, the Confederacy 
would stand before us armed at every point, and menacing us 
on every border. 

As, by the fact of our consenting to an armistice and turning 
from war to negotiation, we should have confessed our inability 
to enforce a restoration of the Union, there could arise in the 
convention no question of restoration, unless the Confederacy 
should choose to propose it. Any insistance on such a point by 
us would be laughed to scorn. We might beg for it, — wc could 



8 

not demand it. What chance there would be that such a prayer 
would be granted, we know from the unwarying declarations of 
the rebels. If the unequivocal assertions of Messrs. Clay and 
Holcombe at the Niagara conference be rejected as unauthorized, 
we have the official manifests of the Richmond Congress during 
its last session, and the official statements of Jefferson Davis 
himself in his recent interview with Colonel Jaquess and Mr. 
Gilmore: — "The war came, and now it must go on till the last 
man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize 
his musket and fight his battles, unless you acknowledge our 
right to self-government. AVe are not fighting for slavery. We 
are fighting for independence, and that or extermination we will 
Jiave. — Say to Mr. Lincoln from me that I shall at any time be 
pleased to receive proposals for peace on the basis of our inde- 
pendence. It will be useless to approach me with any other." 
Or, in the more diplomatic form of Mr. Secretary Benjamin's 
protocol : — 

" The President (Jeff. Davis,) said that the separation of the 
States ivas an accomplished fact ; that he had no authority to 
receive proposals for negotiations except hy virtue of his office as 
President of an independent Confederacy ^ and on this basis 
alone must proposals he made to him." 

No one, not wilfully blind and deaf, can imagine that the 
oligarchs who rule the South, and who can thus defiantly assert 
their independence when Grant, Sherman, Farragut and Sheridan 
are thundering upon the shrunken limits of their Confederacy, 
would listen to our supplications and submit themselves to the 
Constitution which they have spurned, after we had abandoned 
all our advantages, and acknowledged our inability to make a 
permanent impression upon their territories. 

We are thus brought face to face with Disunion. We are 
to recognize as an independent nation the States which have re- 
belled against the common authority of the Constitution ; and 
the " Convention," which the Chicago platform proposes as the 
panacea for all our woes, will find its functions limited to the 
treating of the terms of separation. Into that dismal negotia- 



■ 9 

tion we shall enter under every possible disadvantage. The 
armistice will have placed us in an inferiority of position against 
which we may vainly struggle, and the questions of the boundary 
line, the status of the border slave States, the division of the 
Territories, the^ navigation of the Mississippi, the partition of 
the navy, the apportionment of the old public debt, the rendition 
of fugitive slaves, and the thousand other perplexing questions 
arising from the settlement of our complicated interests, will be 
decided against us by the imperious and triumphant Con- 
federacy. 

How they may be decided is, however, a matter of compara- 
tively minor importance in view of the tremendously greater 
evils of simple Disunion. In yielding that, we yield all. Have 
we ever looked this dread contingency full in the face, and 
realized all its awful purport ? If not, it were well we did so 
now, when it may depend upon the ballot of each individual 
citizen. 

Disunion, then, means the establishment of a boundary line 
of a thousand leagues, with no natural barrier. It means to 
have a hostile nation, embittered by the wrongs inflicted and en- 
dured during four years of furious war, separated from us by 
an imaginary boundary, and ready, on the slightest pretext, to 
renew the conflict. It means to have Lee's army posted per- 
manently on our border, prepared, at any unguarded moment, 
to lay waste our territories, and to repay, on our smiling valleys, 
, the waste and desolation of Virginia. It means to live in per- 
petual war or apprehension of war. Causes of quarrel would be 
BO numerous, that peace would be exceptional, and the narrow 
intervals of peace would be poisoned by the uncertainty of 
their continuance. The farmer sowing his grain would never 
know who might reap the harvest. The trader laying in his 
stock could never tell what unwelcome customer might empty his 
shelves. Industry would be paralyzed, for the capitalist would 
scarcely dare to trust his hoards to the railroad, the mine, or the 
factory, which might at any moment be at the mercy of the 
thousand vicissitudes of war. Our substance would be eaten up 



10 ' 

by huge standing armies requisite for protection. Permanent 
systems of conscription would become obligatory, and every man 
■would have to give the fairest years of his youth to military 
service. Taxation, such as we now have no conception of, 
would be necessary to keep up huge warlike, establishments. 
The whole structure of our society would be changed, and our 
liberties would fall a sacrifice in adapting ourselves to the new 
order of things. 

The South would be essentially a military nation. Slavery, 
secured and perpetuated, would establish forever an aris- 
cracy, which, released from labor, would seek in arms and 
politics an employment for its energies. The " poor white 
trash," disdaining honest labor, would afford material for its 
armies, and on many bloody fields we have learned what their 
disciplined valor can accomplish. With agricultural products 
commanding the markets of the world, a few years would enable 
them to build or buy a navy equal to our own in strength, and 
in no future war could we pretend to blockade their thousands 
of miles of coast. We have found that slavery is an element of 
strength in war, instead of weakness, as we formerly supposed ; 
and the turbulent ambition of the oligarchy would devote itself 
to founding a great military empire, which would permit none 
to live in peace in its neighborhood, and which would be far 
more formidable than its mere numbers would indicate. We 
have learned to our cost how admirably its territory is suited to 
defensive warfare, and we must calculate that all future wars 
would be waged upon our own soil. 

No State in the Union has so much to dread from this as 
Pennsylvania. In any division, she must be content to be upon 
the border. She must bear the first brunt of every attack. 
Countless raids and invasions will lay waste her fields and 
villages, and her industrious population will be driven away to 
seek some safer refuge, for love of home will not withstand the 
repetition of such deeds as the destruction of Chambersburg. 
She, of all others, must turn her attention from honest industry 
to warlike preparation. Her coal and iron and lumber and oil. 



11 

her wheat and corn may be neglected, but her camps and for- 
tresses cannot. The first condition of her existence will be that 
her military interests overrule all others, and that the whole 
strength of her, population constitute a thoroughly drilled and 
organized army,. ready for deadly service at a moment's notice. 
Such a condition is incompatible with progress or improvement, 
and she must be content to be the bulwark of her Northern sis- 
ters, and the battle-ground of a continent. 

Should Pennsylvania cast her lot with the South, as has been 
suggested by some of our Democratic leaders, her position would 
be no better. They would have no community of interests or 
of feeling with her, and would use her mercilessly for their own 
ends. Her sons, conscripted for their armies, would perish 
ingloriously in the effort to extend the area of slavery over 
Mexico, or to reduce their Northern brethern to our own con- 
dition of slavery. We should be virtually a conquered country, 
and though we might be permitted to send Representatives to a 
Confederate Congress, we should be reminded in every debate 
and in every statute of our inferiority. Some few of our leaders 
might be allowed, contemptuously, some share of plunder to 
keep them faithful to their masters, but we, the people, solitary 
in our degradation, Avould know only the whip and the heel of 
the despot. We could not hope to carry with us Ohio, who re- 
jected, by a hundred thousand majority, the traitor Vallandig- 
ham. The foul corruption of New York City might be willing 
to emulate our infatuated infamy, but the masses of her interior 
population would reject with disdain our miserable example. 
New England has always one resource — union with the British 
Provinces — which, separated from the parent country, would 
form with her a powerful Federal Republic, with an illimitable 
future. To such a republic, New York would probably unite 
herself, and together with the other States around the great 
lakes, w^ould constitute a nation containing all the elements of 
prosperity, if only peace could be secured. 

Such would be the position of Pennsylvania in a simple 
division of the Nation into two parts. This, however, would be 



12 

most unlikely. The great Federal bond, once loosened, becomes 
a rope of sand, and tlie process of disintegration once commenced 
would be impossible to arrest. The establishment of a Southern 
Confederacy would be followed by that of a Pacific republic, 
while the North-West, the Middle States, and New England 
would probably be organized in three separate federations. The 
South, held together by the common bond of slavery, would be 
stronger than either of the rest. Perennial causes of quarrel 
would arise between them all. War would become the normal 
condition. Foreign intervention would complicate domestic 
politics, and by skilful alliances the preponderance of the South 
would subjugate one by one the remainder of the States, and, 
after half a century of ceaseless and desolating strife, our once 
happy Union would be a consolidated military tyranny, with 
its industrial civilization crushed out beneath the iron heel of 
war. 

This fearful future, Citizens of Pennsylvania, is the legitimate 
result of the principles insidiously presented for your acceptance 
by the modern Democracy. It seems almost an insult to your 
intelligence and to your manhood for us thus to warn you against 
them, but the Opposition rely upon finding among the people a 
craven fear of the sacrifices entailed by a prolongation of the 
war, which may lead the unthinking to purchase a momentary 
respite with an indefinite future of tumult and disorder. In this 
we trust that they have miscalculated your clear-sightedness and 
your patriotism. 

It matters little that their candidate has been ashamed to 
avow his adoption of their odious platform. It matters little 
that the one proclaims the war to be a failure, while the other 
declares that he could not look a soldier in the face and tell him 
that the sacrifice had been in vain ; that the one pronounces in 
favor of an immediate cessation of hostilities, while the other 
insists that the Union must be preserved at all hazards ; that 
the State Ptights doctrine of the platform becomes the promise 
of a "more vigorous nationality" of the candidate; that the 
arraignment of the administration in the platform, for alleged 



13 

perversions of the war power, is passed discreetly over by the 
candidate whose brightest record is connected with his exercise 
of that same power under the plea of military necessity. All 
this, we repeat, matters nothing. The candidate may be ashamed 
of the platform on which he stands, and yet he stands on that 
platform and no other. The fact that he has the grace to be 
ashamed of it only deepens the disgrace of his acceptance of 
such a position, and destroys any lingering hope which we may 
have entertained that in his character there might ultimately be 
found an antidote for the poison of his party. A man with so 
little independence as to accept a nomination tendered to him on 
principles which he dare not avow, is not a man to be trusted in 
the dread crisis before us. He soothes his conscience with a few 
meaningless phrases in his letter of acceptance, and then casts 
himself in the arms of those who promise him a seat in the 
White House. They know their man. Vallandigham and Sey- 
mour, Fernando Wood and William B. Reed are of a diiferent 
calibre from the weak and vacillating candidate whom they have 
selected as their tool, and they will hold him to their bidding. 

The choice is before you. The re-election of Abraham Lincoln 
by an overwhelming majority will declare to the world the un- 
alterable purpose of the American people to "preserve the Union 
at all hazards," and to maintain the supremacy of the Constitution 
and the Government. It will not only give perpetuity to our 
institutions in the future, but it will prove to the South that its 
last lingering hope of success has failed, and the people, already 
staggering under the blows of Grant and Sherman and Farragut 
will recognize the futility of further resistance. In this way we 
may reasonably look for an early and enduring Union peace. If, 
misled by your own fears and the false teachings of double-faced 
political leaders, you make the fatal error of elevating to power 
the men who have framed the Chicago platform, you may, indeed, 
purchase within the coming twelvemonth a Disunion peace, but 
it will be at the cost of every interest which men hold dear, and 
your children, to the latest generations, will have cause to rue 
the weakness and pusillaminity of their fathers. 



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